access times and lags (2 Viewers)

[shoulderlean]

Im using the StreamedMP skin with the mymovies plug in. I have an athlon 62X2 2.6GHz on an asus m3n78-vm motherboard with 2Gigs of ram running on Windows XP SP3. My video card is an asus 3450 radeon and its connected to my tv via VGA.
All of my movies and music are on another computer upstairs on an external drive and my HTPC (the one with media portal) is downstairs and connected to a home network wirelessly. When i scroll through my music and change songs, there is a very long lag, sometimes 4 to 5 secs before i can control anything again.
Also, at times, my movies cut in and out and dont always play smoothly... i was just wondering, do you think this is because of the wireless network?
Would things run much smoother if i connected the external HDD directly to the HTPC?
Thanks

 

[Sh4nn0w]

I'm using powerline; seems to have removed all my issues with network lag I had on wireless.

I'd say you'd have much less issues with connecting via an external harddrive.

 

[etheesdad]

what speed is the network?

you could test if the external drive is causing the issue by plugging it into the upstairs machine as an internal and see if that fixes the problem.

Alternatively, try the external on the htpc.

 

[shoulderlean]

Well, its connected to a 802.11n router by a 'g' adaptor..... Most times its connected at 54Mbps, but does occasionally drop.

My shared music folder is in the neighbourhood of 30Gigs, but broken up into subfolders that dont exceed 2 Gigs. Will this cause the lag?
Eventually, i will transfer most files over to a SATA drive directly on the HTPC, but funds dont allow for this now, and convenience has the external located upstairs.